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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Carceral Feminism: The Failure of Sex Work Prohibition (2012)

by Robyn Maynard,FUSE Magazine 35-3 ABOLITIONAnti-prostitution
women’s groups — comprised of women morally and politically opposed to
the very existence of the sex trade — have a far-reaching influence in
the Canadian political climate that can be traced back to the
colonization of Canada. While these groups often promote themselves as
advancing an abolitionist feminist agenda, prohibitionist feminism is a
more accurate descriptor, and will be used throughout this essay. [1] In
the present writing, I will argue that the strategies of prohibitionist
feminists do not serve the health and well-being of sex workers, but
actually result in the criminalization of the very people they purport
to protect. In contrast, the arguments in this essay promote a
model of solidarity with sex workers, in support of their own movements
for health, security and dignity within the sex trade.

Sex
workers are marginalized in Canadian society — they face staggering
rates of violence and stigmatization that affect their ability to access
health, social and protective services, and many (especially street-
based workers) are subject to heavy police repression. Trans*,
racialized, and Indigenous sex workers, as well as sex workers who use
drugs, face these forms of marginalization at an even higher level, and
experience higher levels of policing and incarceration. This reality is
largely acknowledged by sex work activists and by most prohibitionists.
[2] The issue that divides sex work activists from prohibitionists is
the determination of the necessary steps to abolish violence towards sex
workers. Prohibitionists believe that sex work, in and of itself, is
inherently violent and exploitative, and propose instead that a
carceral, prohibitionist approach must be taken to eliminate sex work
itself. This model runs contrary to struggles for labour rights,
migrants rights, decriminalization and self-determination which are
currently being waged by sex work activists, as the means to end the
high rates of violence and repression in the industry. As sex work in
Canada is currently under intense public scrutiny, as well as political
and legal upheaval, it is a feminist issue of the utmost importance,
with high stakes in terms of the lives and safety of sex workers. Sex
workers’ voices are not always represented in these debates; however,
organizations run by and for sex workers such as POWER (Prostitutes of
Ottawa/Gatineau Work, Educate, Resist) and legal allies such as the
Pivot Legal Society have produced a wealth of information giving space
for sex workers to describe their realities and needs. This information
was assembled as part of sustained efforts by sex workers to prioritize
their voices in the public domain as the pressure has mounted in the
highly mediatized societal debates surrounding their work. Given this
context, it is more necessary than ever to demonstrate how
prohibitionist feminism’s align- ment with the moral right’s carceral
approach to sex work in Canada results in significant harm to sex
workers’ safety and autonomy. Indeed, much stands to be gained by
redefining a truly abolitionist feminism with the goal of abolishing
violence against sex workers, in solidarity with the safety, needs and
self-determination of sex workers themselves.

Anti-Sex-Work Women’s Groups & Incarceration of Sex Workers in Early Canada: A Historical AccountProhibitionist
groups in early Canadian history were active collaborators with a
carceral agenda focused on the prohibition of sex work, which resulted
in arrests, imprisonment and coerced rehabilit- ation programs for many
sex workers. Many prohibitionist women’s groups were part a growing
trend of criminalization as a means to curb so-called social vices and
impose control over women’s sexuality. This had the corresponding
outcome of policing lower-class women, Indigenous women, immigrants, and
women in the sex trade. In
the 1880s, numerous women’s groups joined forces with various Christian
authorities, such as the Society for the Protection of Women and
Children, in calling for the prohibition of the sex trade, which was
actualized in 1892 with the creation of the Criminal Code of Canada.
various aspects of these laws surrounded “vagrancy,” and targeted
“common prostitutes, people living by the avails of prostitution, and
any night walker not giving a satisfactory account of themselves,”
according to Constance Backhouse. [3] At the level of magistrate courts,
hundreds of women were tried and convicted under these new laws.
Indeed, as Backhouse further notes, “possible prostitution offences
constituted an overwhelming proportion of women’s crimes” from the 1860s
to the mid-1890s. [4] In the early twentieth century, a strong lobby of
women’s anti-prostitution groups in Canada and overseas, in
collaboration with Christian Protestant purity groups, was increasingly
vocal that women in the sex trade needed to be saved. The means of
accomplishing this goal was by arresting them and the men who were their
clients. Michaela Freund has documented one such group, the Vancouver
Council of Women, which was deeply implicated in the process of crimin-
alizing women in the sex trade (and lower-class women more generally).
They argued for more social control and stricter curfew laws, lobbied
for more police supervision of women in the public sphere, and painted
women as victims, while also making them subject to questioning,
detention and arrest when out after nightfall. This lobby spurred the
creation of a new police division called the Women’s Protective
Division, also supported by the Housewives League of British Columbia.
This division started in 1912 and peaked in 1929, and was staffed by
women who did preventative work and home visits in order to stop women
from entering into the sex trade. Joan Sangster, who studied one of
Ontario’s main reformatories, the Mercer Reformatory, demonstrates that
many sex workers were also sent against their will into rehabilitation
centres. These reformatories were not qualitatively different from
prison, as women were held against their will, forced to perform
domestic labour, and further, “only a minority of the Mercer files
indicate that women clearly abandoned or wanted to abandon
prostitution.” [5]

Early
prohibitionist groups also sympathized with racialized anti- immigrant
sentiments, which served to control the movements of immigrant men and
women, and women in the sex trade, under the rubric of fighting what was
then known as the “white slave trade,” or the “white slave traffic.”
Though there was much pressure and social panic surrounding this topic
at the time, Mariana Valverde notes in her research that no evidence of
such trafficking was ever discovered following this campaign. The
National Committee for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, which
was supported by the National Council of Women, identified Chinese and
Japanese men as the purported leading organizers of the “white slave
trade.” Renisa Mawani’s research also demonstrates that the so-called
white slave trade did not in fact relate solely to white women, but was
also mobilized to restrict Chinese women from migrating to Canada, as
they were seen to be at risk of becoming prostitutes. This panic was not
without context, but became a rescue structure hijacked for the
political purposes of the conservative right. Herbert Stephens,
Conservative Member of Parliament and critic of Asian immigration, used
the threat of women being “imported for immoral purposes” [6] as a tool
in a larger anti-immigrant agenda, at a cost lived by immigrants and
women in the sex trade. Indigenous
women were also adversely affected and criminalized by being labeled as
potential victims of the sex trade. For example, the vancouver Council
of Social Agendas also supported the Women’s Protective Division of
policing in the late 1930s due to concerns with supervision of “half
breeds” who were perceived to be in danger of entering prostitution. [7]
In British Columbia, many Indigenous women arrested for
prostitution-related offences were banished from cities and towns and
sent back to their reserves.

Abolitionists,
while purportedly having sex workers’ best interests at heart, have
historically collabor ted with carceral prohibitionist approaches
towards sex work in the imposition of a particular kind of social and
sexual role for women in society, with devastating results lived by sex
workers, immigrants and Indigenous women.

Solidarity vs. Saviours: Decriminalization and Labour Rights, or Rescue and Incarceration? Unfortunately,
we do not have access to the voices of the majority of the sex workers
who were forced against their will into “rehabilitation centres” and
prisons at the behest of prohibitionists, the church and legislators in
early Canadian history. In the current epoch, however, sex workers have
been increasingly empowered to organize themselves, deciding to out
themselves in order to elaborate their needs, rather than being
represented as voiceless victims by others. Organizations run by and for
sex workers, such as Maggie’s, POWER, Stella, and Sex Workers United
Against violence (SWUAv), presently work with thousands of sex workers
across Canada — with some including health services, peer-education,
community research projects and legal advocacy —and
have since their inception been outspoken about the lives, realities
and needs of sex workers. Sex workers and prohibitionists both identify
violence as one of the largest threats to sex workers’ well-being, but
continue to view the process by which to end this violence in
fundamentally contradictory ways, with correspondingly contradictory
outcomes. Though often accused by prohibitionists of glamourizing sex
work, sex work activists of all backgrounds and income levels have
argued that stigmatization, police repression, racism, misogyny and a
societal disregard for the lives of sex workers all contribute to the
violence that they experience. Indeed, sex workers across Canada
organize annual vigils and marches on 17 December to commemorate the
International Day Against violence Against Sex Workers. Sex worker
activists view the harm involved in sex work as rooted in larger
systemic injustices rather than as being caused by sex work itself.
Because of this, sex workers in Canada have increasingly identified the
laws criminalizing their work as one of the major barriers to their
security, and indeed as one of the main causes of the high levels of
violence committed against them.Sex
workers are currently leading two major court cases that identify the
carceral approach to sex work as violating their basic right to security
and blocking their ability to ensure safe working conditions. The case
of Terri Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch and valerie Scott, with the
collaboration of sex workers across Canada, argued this successfully to
the Ontario Superior Court in 2009. They argued that the very conditions
and activities currently subject to legal prohibitions — such as the
ability to work indoors (the “bawdy house” law); hire security,
receptionists and / or management (the “living off the avails” law);
work in groups; and negotiate services and rates clearly with clients in
public locations (the “communication” law) — are precisely the factors
that sex workers have identified as effective in reducing harm and
violence in their working lives. Justice Susan Himel ruled in favour, a
judgment that was seconded unanimously by five judges at he Ontario
Court of Appeal. Two of the five judges stated in strong terms, in
concurrence with Himel, that the laws criminalizing negotiations between
women and clients on the street level exposed them to undue risks
without just cause.

Sex
workers working and living in vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are also
mounting a Supreme Court challenge of the laws criminalizing sex
workers, third parties (reception- ists, security) and clients. An
alliance of several dozen street-level sex workers called the Sex
Workers United Against violence (SWUAv), represented by the Pivot Legal
Society, have on several occasions publicly decried the negative effects
of the criminalization of negotiations between sex workers and their
clients. Numerous government-ordered publications have identified the
criminalization of these client-worker interactions as major factors in
the existing conditions of violence towards sex workers. [8]

Indigenous
sex workers, both individuals and groups, have also spoken out against
the criminalization of sex work, specifically as it has affected
Indigenous women, who face disproportionately high rates

of
violence. Jamie Lee Hamilton, a well-known transgendered Indigenous sex
work activist, has stated that the 1980s police repression of women and
clients on the street level in vancouver’s well-lit urban areas
displaced them to the Downtown Eastside in the first place, creating
unsafe conditions that have contributed to the demon- strably high rates
of missing and murdered Indigenous women working and living in that
neighbour- hood. [9] She herself was arrested and charged under bawdy
house legislation for her creation of “Grandma’s House,” a safe indoor
area for women to bring their clients during a massive spike in violence
in the late 1980s. The Aboriginal Sex Worker Education and Outreach
Project, a group of Indigenous sex workers of all genders in Toronto,
have stated publicly that “the root of this violence [towards Indigenous
sex workers] comes from colonization [...] and that there is no better
time to work around decriminalization, but it is only a step towards
(de) colonizing.” [10]

In a current example of
the power of solidarity (as opposed to prohibition), a groundbreaking
report by Kate Shannon of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in
HIV/AIDS released in May 2012 detailed the increases in perceived safety
lived by sex workers in Vancouver following an unofficial tolerance in
women’s shelters allowing sex workers to bring their clients indoors,
with the following stated rules: “No dealing drugs, no violence and no
pressuring other women into doing something they don’t want to do.” [11]
Women’s shelters decided to listen to sex workers’ needs instead of
imposing their own views on the industry, and correspondingly sex
workers’ safety improved. The claims made by sex workers that
decriminalization would increase their safety have been substantiated in
practice elsewhere, as well. In New Zealand, the only country to have
completely decriminalized sex work, a study commissioned by the Ministry
of Justice demonstrated that sex workers reported feeling less
vulnerable to violence, that levels of exploitation were low, and that
60% of sex workers felt they had a greater ability to report violence
under the new Prostitution Reform Act than without it. The New Zealand
Prostitutes Collective have also stated that access to labour rights
allows them to better fight incidents of violence and exploitation at
their places of work. By contrast, modern day prohibitionism remains a
form of “rescue” feminism rather than one based in solidarity. There are
no prohibitionist groups entirely made up of women currently in the sex
trade, nor do they take leadership from current by-and-for sex worker
organizations. Because of this lack of solidarity, the notions held by
most sex workers regarding their desires for safety and freedom from
violence in their lives differ markedly from both historical and current
methods undertaken by prohibitionists to ensure sex workers’ safety.
Though sex workers have organized to speak for themselves in ways that
did not exist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
prohibitionists actively discount or ignore the increasingly numerous
voices of sex workers who wish to remain in the sex trade but want to do
so without violence.

At
its extreme, the prohibitionist perspective denies that sex workers
themselves can differentiate between forced and voluntary sex work. In
their statement of facts submitted in Bedford vs. Canada, the Women’s
Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution, a group made up of pro-
hibitionists from across Canada, [12] stated both that prostitution, in
and of itself, and regardless of working conditions, is harmful to
women, and that “the challenged laws do not cause or materially
contribute to men’s violence against women.” [13] They argued that it
was not possible for women to work more safely indoors and that pimps
and clients are interchangeable as offenders. Justice Susan Himel,
unchallenged by the five judges at the Ontario Court of Appeal, found
much of the evidence provided by prohibitionists experts to be
“troubling,” asserting that some of their expert witnesses had made
sweeping statements not substantiated by their research. Specifically,
Himel found that certain statements about sex workers were actually
based on research about trafficked women, claims that the average age of
recruitment into prostitution was 14 years old were based on faulty
research, and the
argument that serial killers also targeted women indoors to be
unqualified. [14] Similarly, in May 2012, Quebec’s state-funded women’s
organization the Conseil du statut de la femme released a report
claiming that all sex workers, including those who state that they
worked consensually, were in fact psychologically damaged and suffering
from long-term emotional problems because of their work, repeating the
already-discredited statistic that the average age of entry into the sex
trade is 14 years old. This state-funded body then called for laws
directly in opposition to those advocated for by sex workers across
Canada, and demanded that the government maintain the laws criminalizing
indoor sex work, and for the criminalization of all clients as a means
to protect women in the sex trade. In these examples, the prohibitionist
perspective actively rallies against conditions that sex workers
themselves claim would make their working conditions safer and less
exploitative.

Moral Impositions, Unwanted Solutions: The Criminalization of Clients, and How It Has Failed Sex Workers Contemporary
prohibitionists differ from their historical counterparts in that they
no longer directly advocate for the incarceration or forced
rehabilitation of sex workers as the means by which to end the existence
of the sex trade. However, their approach to abolishing the sex trade
remains necessarily carceral; since the purchasing itself is seen as a
violent act, all clients are seen as abusers and assaulters, and all
workers as victims. Abolitionist feminists in Canada advocate for the
criminalization and repression of clients as a means by which to
eradicate sex work. This carceral approach is known popularly as the
“Swedish” model, because in 1999 Sweden became the first country in the
world to define prostitution as violence towards women, and attempted to
eradicate prostitution by arresting clients. Since its inception, the
Swedish model has been promoted worldwide and enacted in Norway, South
Africa and South Korea, and discussed by law-makers in India, France,
Estonia, Finland, Croatia, the Philippines, Spain, Italy, the United
Kingdom and Canada. Abolitionist feminists in Canada are part of an
international push to enact this model of prohibi- tion as part of an
American initiative that began under the Bush adminis- tration in 2003,
the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) index, which defines sex work as
de-facto trafficking and has called for the criminalization of clients
worldwide. The TIP is a three-tier system grading countries on their
purported success or failure in what it deems to be combatting
trafficking, and it wields significant political influence. In effect,
however, it most often pressures client countries to criminalize (or
increase criminalization) of the sex trade by means of raids and
shutting down sex work establishments, rewarding them for increased
repression of sex work and illegal migration, while also punishing those
who score lowest on the TIP index with the threat of losing American
foreign aid. Though Sweden is lauded by prohibitionist feminists for
taking legislative steps to criminalize clients, its stated purpose of
eliminating the sex industry has been an abject failure: “We cannot give
any unambiguous answer to [the question of whether prostitution has
increased or decreased]. At most, we can discern that street
prostitution is slowly returning, after swiftly disappearing in the wake
of the law.” [15]

Whether
it actually works to eliminate sex work or not, this form of rescue
feminism is disconnected from the needs of sex workers. Indeed, law
enforcement attempts to focus on the criminalization of clients has had
harmful consequences in sex workers in Canada over the past few decades.
Two different reports commissioned by the Ministry of Justice of
Canada, in 1989 and 1994, [16] specified that there was a direct link
between the criminalization of clients, lowered working conditions and
increased violence against sex workers due to rushed negotiations and
sex workers’ loss of bargaining power. In Montreal in 2001, police
conducted massive client sweeps, and Montreal-based sex workers
organization Stella documented a threefold rise in violent incidents,
and a fivefold rise of incidents with a deadly weapon, over a
three-month period at the height of the sweeps.

With
the gradual international implementation of the Swedish model, the
working conditions and relative safety of women at all levels of the sex
industry have been found to be considerably reduced. According to a
study by the Norweigan Ministry of Justice and the Police, street-level
sex workers in Sweden have reported feeling less secure and at greater
risk of violence, and indeed face an actual increase. Women working
indoors in their own spaces have been faced with a deterioration in
working conditions; though selling sex does not in and of itself
criminalize sex workers, many of the means by which women can improve
their safety, such as working together for security and passing on
information about clients, are criminalized, as cited in a report by
Susanne Dodillet and Petra Östergren. Conditions and safety are also
adversely affected as working indoors remains illegal and landlords are
required to terminate leases immediately upon discovery of a tenant’s
occupation or risk being charged criminally. This often leads to
extremely unstable housing situations for those who wish control their
own work environments. The alignment of feminist prohibitionists with
the right-wing carceral approach to sex work does nothing to further the
goal of actually abolishing sex work. Instead, the implementation of
this model uses the law in a manner that augments, rather than
abolishes, the violence, stigmatization and vulnerability faced by sex
workers.

Trafficking Realities: Prohibition vs. Migrant’s RightsIt
is difficult to separate the prohibitionist feminist push for the
criminalization of clients from various “anti-trafficking” campaigns,
since they are used so interchangeably both by the conservative right
and by prohibitionist feminists. Indeed, the topic of trafficking is so
often leveraged as a political tool that it can be difficult to address.
However, the mobilization of anti-trafficking campaigns unevenly
affects migrant women, and therefore needs to be treated distinctly. A
major focus of much prohibitionist rhetoric is that of so-called
trafficked women, and indeed the earlier timeline demons- trates how the
spectre of trafficking has been mobilized in the service of
anti-immigrant agendas, at the expense of migrant women and sex workers.
Though the definition of trafficking in the Criminal Code of Canada can
be simplified to forced labour combined with forced movement,
trafficking as referred to in conservative rhetoric and prohibitionist
feminisms generally refers to the forced sexual labour of women and
children (in a manner that often does not differentiate between adult
women and children). Highly exploitative labour conditions are a reality
faced by many migrants in all sectors in Canada, both for those here
legally through temporary work programs, as well as for those living and
working illegally. Because of their precarious status in Canada,
migrant workers often fear reporting workplace exploitation for fear of
being deported. This is especially true in the context of an occupation
which is itself deemed to be illegal. Though statistics
on trafficking realities vary widely and are difficult to quantify, [17]
actual reported judicial cases of migrant men or women being forced
into sexual labour, confined against their will, or having their wages
expropriated, are quite low in Canada; for example, the RCMP reported 5
criminal convictions for human trafficking between 2009 and 2010. Even
amidst this reality, there were several highly mediatised and expensive
anti-trafficking raids targeting massage parlours throughout the 2000s.
After mass arrests and confiscation of property, it was extremely rare
for any of the sex workers present to be determined to be trafficked.
[18]

The
urgency of fighting trafficking continues to permeate the cultural and
political landscapes, perpetuated both by prohibitionists, conservative
anti-immigrant politicians and law enforcement officials. Sex work
prohibitionists in Canada, the United States and Sweden, define all
migrant sex workers as victims of trafficking, because of their
insistence that no one is able to consent to working in the sex
industry. Due to this, prohibitionist feminists, including the Coalition
Against Trafficking in Women and the Women’s Coalition for the
Abolition of Prostitution, advocate for the criminalization of all
clients as a means of ending trafficking, since they do not
differentiate between voluntary and forced workers. This discourse is
promoted by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, who, Criminal Code
notwithstanding, defined prostitution as sexual exploitation in their
2011 election platform. With new powers instilled by the Omnibus crime
bill (C-10), and the so-called “Protecting vulnerable Foreign Nationals
Against Trafficking, Abuse and Exploitation” section, immigration
officers are now able to refuse would-be migrant women work permits if
they are deemed to be “vulnerable to sexual exploitation.” [19]
According to the bill, so-called unskilled labourers, along with exotic
dancers, are considered potential victims of human trafficking, are
routinely subjected to suspicion, and can be barred from entering Canada
on a permit. This can be understood as nothing other than a
contemporary, gendered iteration of prohibitionist language employed by
politicians in the early twentieth century to justify banning immigrants
from the country.

Though
anti-trafficking, anti-client raids targeting the sex trade are a
reality in Canada, this phenomenon is more common in other countries,
specifically in Sweden and in countries beholden to the United States’
TIP, such as Thailand, Cambodia and South Korea. Indeed, so-called
anti-trafficking repression has shown horrific results for migrant women
in Sweden and Norway. In these two countries, increased police
repression due to enacting anti- trafficking and anti-prostitution laws
immediately led to massive increases in arrests and the deportation of
women living there illegally. Historically, sex workers have been
subject to police raids and arrests in the name of public morality, but
in instances such as these, raids are now also perpetuated in the name
of fighting trafficking. Montreal has also seen an increase in law
enforcement officials entering massage parlours claiming to seek
trafficking victims, and arrests and deportations based on these grounds
have already occurred, as documented by Montreal sex worker
organization Stella, which has thousands of contacts with sex workers
each year. Sex workers generally find these raids traumatic, which,
alongside strict immigration rules, discourages migrant women actually
experiencing extortion or other rights violations from turning for
assistance to police or social services, for fear of arrest or
deportation.

Impediments to Self-Determinationand Safety for Migrant Sex Workers: A Broader Look
Carceral solutions to trafficking suit the needs of prohibitionist
feminists in their push to criminalize clients, and suit the needs of
conservative governments in continually restricting otherwise legal
methods of entering the country. However, the prohibitionist definition
of trafficking fails to address many impediments to the
self-determination and safety of migrant women in the sex trade. In
equating all migrant sex workers as trafficking victims, it becomes
extremely difficult to reach women
who are in situations of actual captivity and expropriation, rare as
these situations may be. In a 2012 paper, Ann Jordan affirms that in
Sweden, fear of arrest and deportation has had the added effect of
dissuading the most vulnerable from accessing social services and
authorities if they indeed require help. Jordan’s research, along with
that of Bob Wallace, Principal Policy Officer of the Prostitution
Licensing Authority of Queensland, also demonstrates that anti-client
laws in Sweden have made clients unlikely and unable to report places
where women did indeed seem to be trafficked, due to fear of
incriminating themselves.

Several
countries in which anti-trafficking campaigns are mobilized on a larger
scale, such as Thailand and Cambodia, have sex-worker-led campaigns
against anti-trafficking efforts pushed onto them by prohibitionists,
conservative politicians and law enforcement. Empower Foundation, a sex
workers’ organization based in Thailand, recently released a report
entitled Hit & Run, which documents the rights abuses caused by
anti-trafficking efforts on sex workers, migrant sex workers and actual
victims of trafficking. They opened their document with the following
statement: “If this was a story of a man setting out on an adventure to
find a treasure and slay a dragon to make his family rich and safe, he
would be the hero. But I am not a man. I am a woman and so the story
changes [...] I am not brave and daring. I am not resourceful and
strong. Instead I am called illegal, disease spreader, prostitute,
criminal or trafficking victim.” [20] Prohibitionist feminism, in
focusing on fighting trafficking by means of the criminalization of the
purchase sex, does not examine the root causes that create exploitative
conditions for migrant workers, including sex workers. In addressing
trafficking itself, as a phenomenon, it is important to recognize the
under- lying conditions which allow it to exist. Nandita Sharma, author
of Home Economics: The Making of Migrant Labour in Canada, argues that
restrictive immigration controls create conditions in which traffickers
can extort wages from and control the movement of undocumented people
living and working in Canada, and that the exploitation of migrant
labour is made possible by Canada’s immigration system. Though actual
forced labour appears to be a rare occurrence, poor working conditions
are endemic to migrants with precarious immigration status. Determining
some people to be “legal” and others to be “illegal” in and of itself
creates a pool of workers vulnerable to exploitation; they do not have
rights, making it impossible for them to defend themselves. Indeed, it
would be much less possible to force undocumented migrants to work under
duress without threats of deportation and the hiding of passports.
Effective anti-trafficking efforts would require undocumented peoples to
be living without fear, and to have equal access to labour rights — as
such, allowing for freedom of movement across borders. Migrant justice
movements, in contrast with feminist prohibitionists, operate in
opposition to the carceral model that perpetuates the vulnerability of
migrants. Instead, migrant justice groups and organizations such as the
Immigrant Workers’ Centre, Solidarity Across Borders and No One Is
Illegal work with directly affected migrants, and address barriers to
safety and security by advocating for access for all to social and
health services, shelters and protection.

Towards a Model of Accountability and Solidarity with Sex WorkersThe
fact that some experience the sex trade itself as a form of violence is
contested neither by sex workers nor by prohibitionists. Also, both sex
workers and prohibitionists affirm that nobody should be forced or
pressured into remaining in the sex trade against their will, and should
be assisted in leaving the industry if they so desire. The laws in
Canada’s Criminal Code which outlaw forced labour, exploitation,
confinement, wage withholding, threats, sexual assault and rape remain
on the books and are uncontested by sex workers or any feminists in
Canada. Sex worker rights organizations in Canada and elsewhere advocate
and provide support for the choice either to enter, remain, or leave
the sex industry. Ethical support requires letting sex workers’
themselves determine their own needs, and recognizing that each
individual has different experiences and is the most capable of
determining the course of her life. All sex workers deserve respect, and
need to be supported in their choices rather than treated as victims
who are incapable of understanding their own oppression. Sex workers not
only deserve respect, but also deserve the basic right to security
while within the industry, and to improve their working conditions. As
Sharma notes, “if we want to end exploitation [...] we give more power
to workers to end their exploitation.” [21] Abolitionists, however well-
intentioned, continue to advocate within the structure of rescue
feminism, supporting carceral policies in line with right-wing
government interests. These policies promote rights abuses against sex
workers. As described earlier, carceral abolitionism has little
quantitative effect on the number of people engaged in the sex trade.
Further, it causes qualitative harm, in the form of stigmatization and
violence towards sex workers (not to mention deportations) who do not
wish to be “rescued.” Concern for sex workers’ well-being cannot and
must not be acted upon blindly, but by taking the lead from those most
affected by the laws: sex workers. They have been at the forefront of
various struggles to remove the laws which enable violence against them,
from Jamie Lee Hamilton, to the brave Downtown Eastside women of SWUAv,
to the three sex workers in the Bedford case, some of whom have
recently seen success in removing the laws that keep them in danger. A
feminism of solidarity is what is now required in order to abolish the
violence faced by sex workers, and to challenge an increasingly
right-wing government hostile to the dignity of sex workers, along with
all women, LGBTQ communities, migrants, Indigenous people, communities
of colour, drug users, the mentally ill and the poor.

[1]
Some sex workers, especially sex workers of colour, find the
application of the term “abolitionist feminist,” which references the
abolition of slavery, to be offensive and inaccurate in its application
to sex work and prefer to refer to it as fundamentalist, prohibitionist
or carceral feminism. [2]
One important exception is the narrow definition of the term “women”
used by most prohibitionists, who define sex work as a violence towards
women in a way that often does not include transgendered women. Though
they often acknowledge the racial and class-based reality of violence
towards sex workers, prohibition- ists often leave out the realities of
the extremely high rates of violence lived by Trans* sex workers, as
well as the existence of males in the sex trade. However, proper
treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this essay. [3]
Constance Backhouse, “Nineteenth-Century Canadian Prostitution Law:
Reflection of a Discriminatory Society” Social History/Histoire sociale
18, no. 36 (1985): 394. [4]
Ibid., 397. [5] Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality,
Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960 (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 109. [6]
Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encoun- ters and
Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921. (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2009), 79. [7]
Mariana Valverde, The Age of Soap, Light and Water: Moral Reform in
English Canada, 1885-1925, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991),
249. [8]
Fraser Committee, Fraser Report, commissioned by Ministry of Justice of
Canada (1985); Street Prostitution: Assessing the Impact of the Law,
Department of Justice of Canada (1989); Étude sur les violences envers
les prostituées a Montréal. Rapport de recherche soumis au ministère
fédérale de la justice (June 1994). [9]
Robyn Maynard, “Jamie Lee Hamilton: Up Close and Personal,” ConStella-
tion, Special Issue on Human Rights (publication forthcoming). [10]
Indigenous People in the Sex Trade: Our Lives, Our Bodies, Our
Realities, Aboriginal Sex Work Education and Outreach Project (ASWEOP),
February 14, 2012. [11]
Susan Lazaruk, “Vancouver Study: Sex Trade Workers Feel Safest When
Working Inside Supported Housing,” The Province, 9 May 2012 (online;
accessed 18 June 2012). [12]
The Native Women’s Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of
Elizabeth Fry Societies, The Canadian Association of Sexual Assault
Centres, Vancouver Rape Relief Society, Action ontarienne con- tre la
violence faite aux femmes, Concertation des luttes contre l’exploitation
sexuelle (CLES), and Regroupement québécois des centres d’aide et de
lutte contre les agressions à caractère sexuel. [13] Fay Faraday and Janine Benedet, Factum for the Intervenor Women’s Coalition (online; accessed 18 June 2012). [14]
Importantly, one of the expert witnesses to have his evidence
discredited was Richard Poulin, who publicly identifies as part of
Quebec’s leading prohibitionist group, the Concerta- tion des luttes
contre l’exploitation sexuelle. [15] Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, Prostitution in Sweden 2007, (online; accessed 18 June 2012). [16]
Department of Justice of Canada, Street Prostitution: Assessing the
Impact of the Law, (1989); Ministère de la justice du Canada, Étude sur
les violences envers les prostituées a Montréal, (June 1994). These
reports also document the harmful effects of criminalizing sex workers. [17]
Indeed, the Canadian government itself has stated both that the scope
of trafficking in Canada is difficult if not impossible to ascertain in
the present: “Currently, there is a lack of reliable, quantitative data
on the scope and nature of human trafficking in Canada and around the
world.” Statistics Canada, Towards the Development of a National Data
Collection Framework to Measure Trafficking in Persons, (online;
accessed 14 June 2012). [18]
This is discussed in more detail in Robyn Maynard, “Trafficking, the
‘Foreign Stripper Problem’ and Migrant Sex Workers’ Rights in Canada,”
ConStella- tion, Special Issue on Human Rights (Publication
forthcoming). [19] Backgrounder: Safe Streets and Communities Act, Department of Justice Canada (online; accessed 18 June 2012). [20]
Hit & Run:The Impact of Anti-traf-ficking Policy and Practice on
Sex Workers’ Human Rights in Thailand, Empower Foundation (2012). [21]
Nandita Sharma, Home Economics; Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant
Workers” in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

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Anarcha: Mother of Gynecology

It was after being part of anarcha.org that I learned of a woman named Anarcha, having nothing to do with anarcha-feminism, but whose story is very relevant. I was reminded of her recently by my friend Will who wants to study midwifery. Anarcha was a slave who was experimented on by a gynecologist numerous times without anesthesia.Anarcha: Mother of GynecologyAnarcha's Story